HELLO?...

I'm not even going to try and write a proper post. Total internet horrors in Paris, despite bringing an iPhone and a macbook. I thought Paris was supposed to be all wi-fi'd up? Maybe the wi-fi went on holiday to Biarritz a week early...

Anyway, who said Parisians don't want to make friends with foreigners? (don't tell Lola)

p.s. Obviously internet horrors notwithstanding, Paris is wonderful, captivating, life affirming, etc etc as always...more when I get a decent connexion!

WINDOWS...

I'm looking forward to spending this week looking both up at and out of Parisian windows.

{my photos: 1. from the bedroom window of the flat in rue de Sévigné where I used to stay. 2. looking up at windows on the Île Saint-Louis. 3. the outside of R & K's windows where I'll stay.}

LOST SATURDAY...

Appalling hangover, first homegrown courgette, watching of To Catch a Thief DVD foiled by mistakenly setting language to "Benelux countries" and being too befuddled to reset it, favourite PJs ripped in sleep, spaghetti with lambs lettuce, olive oil, sea salt, pepper and parmesan, naps, tax bill paid, fast falling delphinium petals...

FURRY FRIEND...

Audrey Hepburn's furry friend was called Famous. (She had a dog called Famous for about 40 years so...)

I love how jealous he is of Ip the deer!

{photo credits: 1. unknown, 2. Bob Willoughby, 3. Conde Nast archive/Corbis, 4. Sid Avery, 5. unknown, 6. Bob Willoughby}

FLYING VISIT...

8 hours of driving in two days means packing light, a swim in the sea (no better way to tell your body it's still alive than by plunging it into icy cold waves), a sunburnt nose, cat foot snuggles with no danger of losing a toe, ice cold rosé, fresh crab and seabass (not pictured - food pics usually look gross on blogs) and realising this is precisely the correct time of the summer to re-read Bonjour Tristesse.

I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL...

Thanks for all the table love - I must admit I'm eyeing up other various bits of wooden furniture as potential future projects. The fact that my first one was an enormous hulking dining table that seats 12 when extended means anything else looks easy enough to accomplish by comparison. I'm supposed to drive to the south coast today (it takes about 4 hours) but I don't really feel well enough. I've had some sort of virus/the thing that's been going round for a week now and it won't go away. If I could just transport myself there in an instant without having to drive it would be ok. Then I could sit on the beach and "convalesce". It's not even warm or sunny but it would be nice. Decisions, decisions.

{Post title: best ever epitaph - on Spike Milligan's grave}
{photos: Camilla Akrans}

60 HOUR MAKEOVER...

I used to think my aunt and uncle's house was weird. It was built in the sixties and was completely different to any other houses I knew in my childhood. The ground floor living area was open plan with a wooden floor and a huge white modular shelving unit on wheels dissecting the middle of it. (Obviously "modular shelving unit" wasn't in my vocabulary back then.) All the furniture was straight and angular. The windows were huge and looked out onto a pretty little wood. I remember thinking that their kitchen looked like a spaceship. They had a huge terrarium and their bath was bright yellow. Now that I'm a grown up, I can see that their house wasn't weird; it was completely fucking amazing and they were way cooler than I ever gave them credit for when I was nine.*

When the house was sold, I came into possession of their Danish midcentury dining table, which I swiftly proceeded to destroy by spilling various beverages all over it. The varnish had also gone orange (cannot.stand.orange.toned.wood.) over time. I felt a bit bad about ruining the table, so I covered it with a tablecloth and forgot about it - once every few years getting quotes for refinishing it, which were more expensive than the cost of a new table. I put the tablecloth back on and my aunt and uncle continued to convey slight disapproval from the afterlife.

{The offending article}

Until yesterday the day before yesterday last Monday last week when I got a very strong friend to help me drag it outside. (In the pictures the leaves which make it roughly double the size are tucked in.) After many, many hours days of stripping off all the old varnish, then sanding the stains out, covering it with bin liners weighted with laundry pegs every time it rained, then oiling, then oiling again, then oiling again (had lost the will to live, never mind the instructions) and buffing, I completed my first only ever table restoration project. Then I had to get it back inside. Then sand it where a few drops of rain fell on it, then oil it again. Twice. And then it looked too perfect so I sanded it a bit here and there to fuck it up a bit.

{Ta da}

I kind of sort of know in my heart that I liked how it looked much better before I oiled it, when it was all stripped and raw, but I'm sticking my fingers in my ears and going LALALA so I can't hear those thoughts because I'm never doing that again.

{*In the interests of honesty when I was 9 I thought they were cool already because their cats were called Tabitha and Jessica and I had only met cats called things like Lucky and Sooty before. Tabitha was a boy.}

**Overuse of strikethroughs = what happens when you write a post in draft about something you haven't finished doing yet.

DUSKIN...

Duskin has a gorgeous proper website to go with Stephanie Tran's lovely clothes now.

{photos from FW10 lookbook}

JUST WHEN...

...you thought you were dying of ennui you get spontaneously invited to a poetry reading thing in Deptford. You don't even have time to -
Shuffling in to a white wooden basement lined in old mirrors you sit on a pew (literally, you sit on a church pew) and hear the end of a cute young bloke who talks about sorrow and makes everybody laugh. Another man recites something very, very long with feeling and the Australian lady talks in between her poems about leaving a broken love to travel by bus from Calcutta to London in 1969, through Afghanistan and places we can't safely go to anymore; about how once you're a traveller you always are and you become more...global as well as regional. The man with turquoise cuffs has a guitar and sings about the government offices and about not hanging on to old ideas - letting go for survival, or at least that's what I heard. The guy with patterns and dreads taps his feet and rocks and those sitting on the pew all rock, an involuntary but pleasant audience participation. Rhymes, rhymes, repeating, repeating. Then comes John invoking Kerouac and he's the only poet here with his own Slovakian percussion section, his own personalised hat - but he is the one who is a poet every minute of the day and who, yes, makes us gel and this evening has now become an entity of its own. Then Rachel, or is it Russell? Well Russell is Rachel tonight and regales us with poems and tales of elf shelves, the missing piece of the Bayeux Tapestry starring cats, the Lion with cheesegrater paws children's book and about the geography teacher turned decorator who won't or can't just paint it magnolia.

And I'm not tired at all anymore.

TIRED...

I've been so tired for the past few days, I don't even know why.


{I heard the air conditioning, the sound of the ceiling fan, the unfamiliar sounds of Udaipur waking up. But I couldn't place the whirring, clicking noise...
photo taken by Anna at 6.30am on our first full day in India}

LULA/LULU...

Finally I popped up to the Lula pop up shop in Harvey Nichols. Behold, my lightning fast investigative reportage. Aren't you glad we have the internet so that we can communicate about new things instantly? So, the Lula pop up shop has been there for about a week - shall I just hand calligraph this post, seal it with wax and cycle round to your house to hand deliver it instead?

I don't get over to Knightsbridge much these days, but I'll always have a soft spot for Lula so I went today and had a look at the very charming little Lula bit, which was designed by Fiona Leahy and is there to celebrate 5 years of the magazine. (You can read a proper, timely and informative post about it here.) There were "J'aime Rodarte" and "Radarte" sweatshirts, which I'm so tempted by even though I never wear anything like that. There were also cute things made especially for Lula by Leith Clark's and your faves: Lover, Erdem, Miu Miu, Charles Anastase, Rachel Antonoff and Sonia Rykiel. And Lula/Harvey Nics lollipops. What else would one expect. The bits and bobs like the Vanessa Bruno CD and APC DVDs were a nice touch and I had a flip through Derek Blasberg's book, Classy, which only made me even more curious about him. Is he really the Truman Capote of our era? A question for another day.

And then in the beauty department I tested Escentric Molecules. The name had kept popping up and then a while ago I was in a restaurant and there was this woman who this bloke kept saying was Lulu and she clearly wasn't. We had to get her over to confirm this and she smelled amazing. I kept asking what her perfume was and she was saying, it's me, it's all me. Eventually I got her in a firm headlock and she admitted it was Escentric Molecules. It's not quite true that it was all her - it was in fact a single aroma chemical called Iso E Super. There's a range of scents but I wanted to test the original one (Molecule 01) that has no added perfume, just the pheromone whatsit thingy. I sprayed quite a bit of it on my arm and at first I couldn't smell anything. But after a while it smelled really nice - comforting, and then on the tube MEN kept eyeing me up, I swear. I'm surprised they didn't all start sticking their noses in the inside of my elbow because I certainly did when no one was looking. Even after a shower I can still smell it. So after years of Frederic Malle and Miller Harris, I may too convert to wearing this perfume that isn't really a perfume recommended by fake Lulu.

THE MOST PERFECT...

...couple of magazine pages I've seen in a long time. Pages 66 and 67 from Russh issue 33. Click here to read the text.



Thank you If Jane for sending me this copy of Russh during its perplexing disappearance from London's magazine shelves!

7...

If Jane and Ephemerette passed the versatile blogger award on to me - merci beaucoup! So now I have to reveal seven things about myself and pass the award onto some of my favourite blogs...

Seven things I like. I cheated a bit, but surely the things you like reveal something about you?

1. The number 7.

2. Being an autodidact. I only learned this word the other day - hey, sometimes things take a bit longer when you're self taught. Phew! I feel so much more legit now that I have a fancy concise word to justify describe the way I learn.

3. This home.

4. American Apparel underwear. No, seriously I do! It doesn't look anywhere near as sleazy if you don't pull those slutty poses like they do on the website, which I'm not linking to. It's very well cut as well. Though I read somewhere that AA is "on the brink of total collapse" so I'm stocking up on more micro mesh triangle bras and low slung briefs. (Sooo not linking - far too many nipples.) I'm trying to forget that I also read Dov Charney tries all the underwear (just the underwear samples we hope) on himself.

5. I like the idea of dyeing the ends of my hair faded pink. (Like 10% of that.) I've been ruminating on this for a few months, though as yet I haven't reached for the Manic Panic. But I have dark hair, so to get your hair pink, you have to bleach it first. But if it was just the ends, you could have it cut out when you got bored of it...(this is how my ruminating process goes.)

6. The high waisted black silky shorts I bought at Warehouse for £13 in the sale.

7. Illesteva's lookbook models.

I'm giving the award to:

Toujours Toi
So Much To Tell You
Scout Holiday
Ringo, Have a Banana
Kempt
Jeana Sohn


{photo: Mike Vorrasi}

LINKAGE...

* I've always loved Elisa Nalin's styling, so it was nice to see inside her wardrobe, having previously seen inside her home. (And her new haircut!)

* TinEye Reverse Image Search. No more excuses for not crediting photographers blogworld!

* AnOther Loves - I wish I had thought of designing my blog like this.

* Lost Cat Poster.

FRANKLY...

Franks Cafe and Campari Bar is BACK and about 80 times more packed than it was last year. This could be because last summer, lolling about on the top floor of a multi-storey carpark in Peckham involved wearing multiple woollen layers and trying to find the least wind battered spot. Or it might just be because more people have heard about it this year. In any case, the weather forecast continues to predict *SCORCHIO* temperatures for London, so going there every day might be a good plan. It's open from 11am - 10pm Thurs - Sun. As a connoisseur of bitters based drinks I advise forgoing the Negroni or Aperol Spritz and just sticking with Campari & soda. The bar gets insanely busy so buy at least 3 rounds at a time. And the food is great, as you'd expect from Anchor & Hope alumni. Oh, and stay behind the line. Also there are various random bits of wood and iron girders on the floor which may be sculpture, or may just be general debris. If you don't look down you might trip over something and look really stupid in front of about 800 people.

And p.s. The lift only goes up to Level 5 and it's really creaky and scary, so you may as well just walk up and up/down and down the ramps as if you were in a car. It says on Franks' website that you can park your car on level 6, but when my friend did this he got a parking ticket so who the hell knows.

A CASA...

I promise I haven't spent the entire week floating in a swimming pool - that was just last weekend. I'm afraid that, when the weather turns to sweet, wonderful summer I start skiving off. I can't believe it, it's been like summer for two weeks. Unbelievable. It can't last.

Lola and I have been hanging around at home with all the windows open, meeting up with friends, wearing short shorts in public, drinking San Pellegrino Limonata (not Lola) and generally appreciating summer in a way that's only possible in the knowledge that it could all go away tomorrow.

I promise I'll be back in the next couple of days with some clothes for sale and some proper posts that don't involve swimming pools.